#so I thought it would be a good idea to systematise them

[teddybasmanov]

Hey, so literally nobody cares, but I organised my writing (AO3 and Tumblr titbits) and song takes masterlists by fandom, in case someone (who's not me) actually wants to find something on this blog.

[canmom]

phyg

(The title refers to the fact that during early discussions of whether LessWrong constituted a cult, they ‘tabooed’ the word cult by replacing it with rot13′d phyg. However, it’s not just about LessWrong, but about cults in general.)

I’ve kind of backed off from writing about the lesswrongers for a few reasons, mainly that I’d moved on in my own life. Though another strong reason is that the revelation of all the heinous sex abuse shit going on there (resulting in the suicide of members) meant that it was less ‘internet rabbit hole’ and more ‘some of these people are actively abusing people and many others are in the process of being victimised by them, and it feels very inappropriate to stand at the sidelines poking fun at Roko’s basilisk’

There’s a post going around about Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the way their ‘missionary work’ functions less to bring new members into the cult and more to give the existing members a perception of outsiders as being rude and hostile, thus drawing them back into the fold. So I worry a bit that taking a stance of making fun of lesswrongers helps fulfil a perception that non-members of the cult are a ‘sneer club’, and kindness can only be found inside.

It’s a fine line to walk because part of helping people escape must involve helping them see the flaws in ideas used to control and abuse them. Roko’s Basilisk was a rather crude example, but there’s many variants; certain LessWrong members seem very adept at manipulating feelings of guilt and obligation, and part of that often seems to involve trying to make people feel personally, individually responsible for very large-scale dynamics to which the person (and LessWrong in general) is the only remedy.

So you need to kind of make clear that no, what’s at stake isn’t the future of humanity, that all the stories they tell about AIs and so forth are science fiction.

My own history on the periphery of cults

I should also note that I kind of feel that the difference between ‘cults’, ‘religions’, ‘ideologies’, ‘movements’, arguably even ‘fandoms’ and ‘subcultures’ is often more a matter of degree (along various spectra) than kind. Different dynamics prevail at different scales. I’m going to outline the features that make me call something a ‘cult’ below.

(this gets fairly long...)

I grew up in Glastonbury, a town that’s home to a lot of the remnants of new-ageism and hippie-subculture in the UK. Undoubtedly there were a few cults around me. My parents were at first neopagans, and later just became the kind of generically nonreligious but maybe a little ‘spiritual’ people which form the majority of the UK.

At some point in my late teens, I found the ‘sceptical’/‘atheist’ movement online, which at the time prioritised deflating alternative medicine and criticising creationism (before its hard right wing turn). It was through them I found my way to LessWrong, which presented itself as a kind of the next level of scepticism: through ‘Bayesianism’ they would systematise the kind of thought prevailing in sceptical movements and turn it into a machine for ‘overcoming bias’ and believing the right thing.

And as it happened, Yudkowsky-the-expert [prophet] wrote, properly applied Bayesianism would lead you to perceive the vast threat of an ‘unfriendly AI’. Wouldn’t it be lucky if someone was fighting the good fight against that before it happened?

After maybe a year, I managed to bounce off getting too deep into LessWrong because of those early posts about Roko’s Basilisk and its culty behaviour, but its traces - a perfectionist belief in ‘utilitarian’ ethics, a kind of po-faced affect where everything must be evaluated ethically at all times, a belief in the great scientific mission of humanity, a weird obsession with testing my beliefs against the things I found most unlikely (in this case, fundamentalist Christians at university), interests in epistemology and aging research and (then very nascent) ‘effective altruism’... I was never really a member but it kind of did a number on me!

At much the same time, I got hit hard by the rise of what I might call ‘online social justice’ (proponents might say ‘intersectional feminism’, but that refers to a lot of things). In this case, I think many of the fundamental beliefs - that our society is structured by deep injustices, such as white supremacy, heterosexual patriarchy, disablism to name a few that were salient to this movement - are absolutely correct. But this doesn’t mean that some of the same dynamics weren’t prevalent.

Again this belief system functioned heavily on guilt: starting with the itemised privilege checklist, the only way to address your complicity in oppression was to obsess over it at all times, and in particular scrutinise your language for inadvertent double meanings. To encourage this, a mechanism for punishing people through public shaming developed; it took a while for people to recognise that the dynamics of who got targeted for dogpiles, and what happened to those targeted, were largely orthogonal to what particularly terrible thing someone may have done or not.

Because this movement heavily overlapped with fandom (as a product of LiveJournal at first - this was where racefail ‘09, the incident that drew me in, played out), a great focus of this movement was media criticism. If the corporate entertainment products we consume could be made to portray The Gays in the right light, then surely social change would follow? I think a lot of this was driven by a need to be doing something within the social spaces we were moving in, which were focused on consumption of fan media.

Unlike LessWrong, ‘online social justice’ had its celebrities (and public sacrifices) but did not have any central charismatic figure. Still, this belief system provided a lot of fertile ground for people to build themselves up as progressive, ‘indie’ alternatives to the corporate media order. Most were sincere in pursuing this, but the ‘winners’ ultimately cast down anyone as it suited them as they scrambled for positions in that same order.

Unlike LessWrong, ‘online social justice’ enjoyed a certain degree of mainstream success, seeing its language taken up by a few larger outlets; it also ended up provoking a big and very nasty right-wing backlash equally obsessed with the ‘social justice warriors’ who might threaten their power in whatever way. This backlash, though just as nasty and cultish in itself, picked up many of the criticisms of cultish ‘social justice’ dynamics, and so denying these dynamics were significant became itself a moral imperative and made it very difficult to actually assess what is happening.

So to be very clear: I am grateful that my participation in ‘online social justice’, however shallow my concerns seemed in retrospect, revealed a lot of places I was dangerously ignorant and I’m pretty sure in some ways made me a better, more caring person. However, it also gave me some very unhelpful self-destructive thought patterns, which made me pretty insufferable and sometimes quite nasty about things which really didn’t better, and I hope I’m growing out of the worst of it.

Ironically, the SJ side of things helped me avoid getting sucked into LessWrong too bad, because it was obvious that those guys didn’t really give a shit even before I learned about their friendship with neoreactionaries. I never made a decisive break with ‘SJ’, but hopefully I’ve since developed some more robust and less easily manipulated thought forms - that can’t be taken up by someone’s personal campaign to dispose of their victim quite so easily.

Then, in more recent years, my cult flirtation of choice was a strain of Leninism/Maoism. I never got anywhere near joining an actual Leninist party (thank fuck), but I did spend a lot of time challenging myself to read MIM (prisons) and the like, despite it obviously being kinda off.

Much like LessWrongism in relation to ‘skepticism’, the Leninism was able to present itself as a kind of refinement of the belief system I already had, and my rudimentary understanding of capitalism, colonialism etc. They could say that obviously racism is real, but unlike those nerds obsessed with cartoons, we have the right way to analyse it and the right program to destroy it. (That is of course elaborately written out nationalist fantasies and cheerleading for whoever America is fighting at the moment. It’s working great, guys.)

I had one friend who was particularly deep into this worldview, and eventually denounced me and cut all ties because I wouldn’t join in a harassment campaign calling a certain then-popular trans musician (who I have never spoken to before or since) a pedophile. Outside of that, you can see can see this worldview’s traces in posts from that period: I started dropping words ‘imperialism’ more for example.

What really prevented me from getting sucked into this cult was, perhaps, the same obsessive scrupulousness that I’d developed while dealing with the lesswrongers. I spent a lot of time digging into the history literature regarding things like the gulags and the famines in the USSR and China during the periods that the Maoists celebrated, and concluded that the historical evidence they dismissed was pretty strong, and they were full of shit. I didn’t really want to be friends with people who were such huge fans of gigantic incarceration programs and that kind of deflated the whole thing.

I also was lucky enough to find things like the Neue-Marx-Lekture and communisation theory and other more anarchist-aligned approaches to Marx. However accurate they may be about Marx (ultimately irrelevant, ideas are useful or not regardless of who came up with them), they made it very clear how many ways there were to approach this history and the appealing parts of Marx’s work, so the ‘package deal’ presented by the Maoists and Leninists (Marx’s criticism of capitalism is insightful, so you must cheerlead Stalin with us) became obviously nonsensical.

Of course, I’m now much more deeper into the leftist subcultural sphere than the average person. Most people do not have opinions on “self-abolition of the proletariat”, nor do they do any of the dubiously effective offline stuff. I like to think I have a healthily cautious approach to the various prevailing ideologies around me, and an actual sense of humour about all this nonsense (hard to emphasise how important that is!), but who knows what I’ll think in a year...

so what’s a cult anyhow

I’m not familiar in detail with the research literature on cults or ‘new religious movements’, but here are some salient features that seem to me to create the dangerous kind of pattern:

a claim to urgency: there is a great problem which nobody is taking seriously enough. this can be a real problem (gender and racism exist and people are suffering under them every day) or a made up problem (an AI might turn us all into paperclips); it will need to appeal to a specific milieu to be effective (programmers who read science fiction novels, people who have experienced homophobic abuse in their lives, followers of a ‘mainstream’ religion)

this is often presented as a world-ending catastrophe, but it can equally well be a minor injustice, or something blown way out of proportion.

a claim to legitimacy: the cult are uniquely equipped to face this problem, or possess a unique wisdom. perhaps they alone have the right theoretical tools, or perhaps they have a claim to a lineage. a very hardline distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ helps here (Mao’s idea of the ‘two-line struggle’ was a gift to cult-builders).

for religious cults (the most stereotypical kind), the cult leader is the recipient of a unique vision, or simultaneously descended from Jesus, Mohammed and the Buddha.

for a certain kind of leftist, the Party (all five members!) is the sole inheritor of the ‘red thread’ of history that begins with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, uniquely upholding the correct ideological line in the face of revisionism.

for (pseudo)scientists like LessWrong, the cult’s methods are truth-preserving in a way mainstream academia isn’t, or hidebound academics are too blinkered to investigate the phenomenon in question whereas we have the sense to see something there.

I’m sure you can think of more... a scrappy underdog speaking truth to power is always a handy one I guess?

a means to isolate members: this can be physical isolation (the cult lives in a remote location), social isolation (members encouraged to cut ties with non-members), or it can be something like opaque jargon or outlandish, difficult-to-explain beliefs so the only people who can discuss the cult’s worldview are other members.

I should emphasise that many people have unusual beliefs and come to no harm for it; it’s their role in a system of power and control that makes the beliefs dangerous, which can work almost regardless of the content of these beliefs.

a threat of punishment: particularly isolation. If leaving the cult means alienating your entire social circle, then it’s an almost insurmountable obstacle. But cults can also instil complexes of guilt (if you leave or disobey, you will be responsible for poverty or the failure of the revolution), or practice regular public shaming. I haven’t personally dealt with physical punishment but I’m sure it’s an element.

the LessWrong probabilistic mindset is ingenious here: you can make something ever so slightly more or less likely according to a subjective probability model, but on the level of intuition that still feels like you are responsible for the horrifying terrible thing!

the ritual of a public apology is another extremely powerful mechanism (and why I’m very wary of leftist notions of ‘self-crit’). even if you’re just doing it to get people off your back, making a definite declaration has an effect on your worldview (are all these people wrong?); and watching someone take the stance of apologetic failure/sinner has a big effect on observers as well in terms of illustrating the lines of power.

a feeling of constant scrutiny and unpredictable punishment is very effective. no matter how hard you try, your words might betray your secret error/sin, and you can never be sure of the underlying principles or reliably apply them, so you must obsessively self-scrutinise and research the ‘right ways’ to act, perhaps even pre-emptively apologise if you catch something you did wrong before. but the prevailing narrative is of course that, all of this is (or should be) simple and obvious! or else the effort of having scrupulously correct language helps demonstrate your personal virtue.

abuse: particularly, sexual. Many of these dynamics are abusive in themselves, but once you’ve got a cult running, it seems all but inevitable that someone will abuse the power they have over members in a more personal, direct way. All the cult or cult-like movements I’ve described, and many other cults I’ve brushed up against like just about every Leninist or Trotskyist party in the UK left, have their history of sex abuse scandals that could call the organisation into question, and cover-ups within the ranks. There’s probably a lot more that doesn’t get revealed.

disposability: given the power of ostracism outlined above, members must be prepared to learn that a friend has become suspect and that it’s dangerous (in a moral sense, or for their own personal social future) to continue to associate with them. This may happen after a long period of bullying, when it is no longer useful or convenient to keep that person around for the individuals wielding power, or it may happen seemingly at random as a constant threat to the remaining members.

The common feature running through all of these is that they ensure the ongoing reproduction (and perhaps even growth) of the cult. This doesn’t have to mean the same people: some cults keep a small core members for a long time, others (like your prototypical Trotskyist party) have a hard core who wield the power, and a continuous churn of peripheral members who are exploited.

Of course, many if not all of these traits can be recognised in ‘mainstream’ society, under the power of a state or company or in academia:

claim to legitimacy: democratic mandate, ‘rule of law’, the contrast with the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ or rival ‘authoritarian’ state, a history of success in business, science vs. superstition, possession of scientific and other academic expertise, fame in itself...

isolation within a worldview bubble: this one may seem like a stretch since it’s not really ‘isolation’ if most of society shares it, but mechanisms like language differences, preferential media coverage and the routine incarceration of people deemed ‘insane’ can all help to keep people within a particular ‘Overton window’ within a particular society.

in smaller scales, e.g. a company or academic institution can provide a more specific ‘bubble’ effect, focusing attention and effort on the organisation’s concerns.

claim to urgency: this one’s more complicated since most societies are not organised on the basis of a single overarching threat. probably the closest thing we have is ‘reproductive futurism’, the requirement to reproduce the next generation and the threat of failure to do so. on smaller scales, a project may fail, a company might go bust, the economy might go into a recession and so we must work... and then there’s exceptional events like ‘terrorism’ and the present virus pandemic. (claims to urgency may be at least somewhat legitimate!)

threat of punishment: the police and threat of incarceration and other official punishments are the most obvious mechanisms, but there’s also a lot of punishment done under the guise of healthcare, such as holding people deemed ‘mentally ill’ in wards. medicine is practised to the primary end of ensuring the reproduction of society, and ‘mental health care’ is an indistinct blend of heavy coercion and things that might be genuinely useful in other circumstances.

Apart from that, you’ve got the wage mechanism: if you don’t work for someone with money, you don’t eat. Almost nobody has the option of producing their own food.

You also have people bound together in reproductive units, notably the family. You cannot leave if doing so would deprive you of your means of subsistence.

abuse: is blatantly prevalent anywhere there’s power. the heterosexual nuclear family and prisons deserve special acknowledgement here.

disposability: any ‘social safety net’ is designed to push people back towards work. If you end up homeless on the street, odds are pretty high you’ll die of pneumonia rather than find your way back into some form of stability. We are trained to walk past people who need help, knowing or deluding ourselves that we can do nothing for them, every day we go outside. And that’s not to go into dynamics within just about all specific ‘communities’ to guard the walls and expel problematic cases

Does this mean the label ‘cult’ is useless, since it can capture almost all groups at a stretch? As mentioned earlier, it’s a matter of degree, such as the particular intensity of the cult mechanisms. Thus I still think it’s helpful to talk about how these dynamics can manifest (often all the more intensely) in more marginal spaces.

On LessWrong

LessWrong seems like an unusual cult in a few ways. A lot of its internal discussions are not made private; rather, what keeps them closed is the opaque forest of jargon which can only be parsed given extensive familiarity with its writing.

It’s very conscious of itself in relation to academia in the hard sciences, which is both its aspirational model (providing much of its language and its obsessions) and its bugbear (they won’t take us seriously, we’re too many inferential steps away). They may appeal to a historical lineage to a degree (the Enlightenment!!), but they are also quite proud of making displays of novelty (we’ll propagandise through a Harry Potter fanfiction, look how modern and switched on we are), and enjoy the sense of being challenging and disruptive.

One quite nasty trick is that LessWrong sells itself as improving rationality, and illustrates this by drawing on genuine ‘cognitive bias’ research and pulling out a battery of common epistemological errors which they claim to inoculate against; thus as one gets drawn in they can easily believe that they’re becoming more cautious and sceptical, not more credulous. It also potentially gives a quick way to dismiss people who haven’t gotten in: they are too ridden with bias to be worth consideration.

Of course, LessWrong members do not reason like a theoretical Bayesian agent any more than any other human does. Performing a Bayesian update on all your beliefs in light of new evidence is impossibly computationally expensive, and as they well acknowledge, the majority of our reasoning and perception is better understood on the basis of heuristics and habits which work ‘well enough’ to get by. So far, I doubt they’d be disagreeing with me.

What goes wrong is when the ‘Bayesianism’ starts becoming a rhetorical performance: speaking in terms of ‘probabilities’ which have not been calculated and could not be, claiming to be ‘updating’ when one learns something new, appealing rhetorically to some mathematical property of Bayes’ theorem without actually ever doing a Bayesian calculation.

With these devices, LessWrong members can paint a picture of a careful, considered mathematical reasoner sharing their results in detail, while actually the appeal works on that performance: it uses the right jargon, it affects the right rhetorical style. This performance probably works on the speaker as much as anyone; it feels right to use.

That said, much of LessWrong on this website has moved on from the dramatic performance of Bayesianism per se, but they still have a tendency to write in a particularly insular style drawing more on the rhetoric of the blog Slate Star Codex (which seems to have almost eclipsed Less Wrong itself in the milieu). Despite a few rationalists habitually picking fights with members of other cliques, they tend to fairly effectively repel non-LessWrongers.

Of course, there are many cliques in this website (no doubt I can be said to be in a few!); use of jargon and speaking to a specific group with shared concerns is not in itself automatically a problem. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that many of the concerns of LessWrong are quite interesting subjects to explore, and aren’t often explored elsewhere without a lot of money to go to university (and be subject to its own forms of brutal hazing). The problem is not that a group of people exist who share unusual beliefs, but the function of the cult-mechanisms outlined above, and the way they lead on to actions like SWATting and the sex abuse linked at the top.

So far, so familiar; and this may be the last thing I write about LessWrong, at least for a long while. I hope my words can be useful for people in that milieu to start considering, if not immediately getting out, at least making sure they are anchored in personal relationships outside the cult context, and treating it with the same degree of scrutiny it encourages you to apply to everything else.

For me, the instructive thing about LessWrong is to try and keep track of these dynamics, so I might be able to tell whether I’m falling into them in some other context.

When do ‘groups of people with unusual beliefs’ turn into cults?

This is really the crux of it, yet also the hardest part. Simply naming cults I’ve orbited is not very useful if I can’t recognise a pattern, or work out a way to intervene (at least inside my own head) which could have helped me before.

In many cases, (pseudo)cults may be a defensive formation. Certain actions - gender transition for example - automatically invite a great deal of hostility, which can really only be survived by banding together with other trans women. That doesn’t make us a cult, but it lays a seed.

By contrast, trans woman exterminationist feminists form a particularly blatant cult, which portrays our existence as a threat in the ways described above. They level the accusation of being a cult against us in ways that are for the most part quite hollow, since they’re predicated on gender transition being unthinkable as something one might actually desire for any reason beyond ‘brainwashing’. Yet I think it would be dangerous to us to completely deny the existence of some cult-like dynamics in the way we treat each other (if not in the illusory ‘trans community’ at large, then in specific cliques and subcommunities around you, transfem reader). Cult dynamics do not require that the threat be fake.

I can observe a few things that help resist this: we have incredibly varied means of analysing gender and naming ourselves, and many attempts to establish an orthodoxy ultimately fall rather flat. As much as I’d like my own understanding to be better known, I think this is a valuable trait. There are also groups of us who have seen these dynamics play out time and time again, and consciously attempt to defend each other.

But I don’t know if there’s any general recipe for anti-cultishness. Even a principle like ‘anti-disposability’ can be used to enforce cult-like behaviour: if you can be convinced that personally cutting ties with someone who’s treating you horribly amounts to disposing of them, as has happened to so many trans women, then you can be forced to put up with a whole lot of shit when actually the person would be just fine if you cut ties, or at least the effect they have on you is not worth bearing.

I often come back to something my friend @porpentine​ wrote (before I knew her), a followup snippet to her essay Hot Allostatic Load which described her experience of abuse and trashing by a particular cult-like group of indie game developers. Among what she wrote is this:

Like she said, this ‘sustained application of will against entropy’, facing up to the social systems around us in all their harrowing complexity, is not something that can be reduced to an authoritative text, containing a list of rules or fundamental principles from which everything else neatly follows. That’s something which, unfortunately, can be internalised only through experience and practice, and you will make the wrong call sometimes. All I can hope is that the story I tell, and the models I’ve built, can end up being helpful to a few who read my writing.

So what I will say to finish is: there certainly are real catastrophic threats in the world (like climate change), and there are all sorts of daily miseries which endlessly claim more people (far too many to list). This does (and should!) inspire a sense of terrible urgency as you become aware of it. But, this world also has many systemic dynamics and groups which will (consciously or not) eagerly inculcate and exploit your feeling of urgency, guilt and desperation, and use it to control and abuse you, or use you to do that to others. Somehow, we have to act responsibly to find a worthwhile path in all this, to take it seriously but not obsess in a way that’s futile and harms ourselves and others.

It’s not easy, and I certainly haven’t solved it. But that’s ‘the work’...

[viviansternwood]

So the absolute sweetest @blodreina-noumou tagged me to do this positivity meme that is about choosing your five favourite mutuals in the fandom and giving them all the love. I’m all for it, but five??? How am I supposed to leave it at that?

I mean since she was the one who tagged me, I’m perfectly within my right to talk about Steph. She appeared at the time when this fandom was basically drowning in Octavia hate and for some time I felt so lost because it seemed like I was the only person in the 100 fandom not only not hating her guts, but also trying to defend her. I kept posting positivity about Octavia and getting hate in response, but then Steph started reblogging my stuff and I was like, wait... There are people who love her, just like I do. I followed her, and it’s been amazing every since. She’s a very private person and tends to stay out of any fandom brawls, but she’s very good at just... being there for people, you know? So many times I would be having one of those moment when I just hated my life, and I’d post something about it not expecting anyone to read or care, and Steph would suddenly come out and say something that, if not necessarily fixing things, pushes me along on the path. And that’s what matters, doesn’t it? Someone who helps you make small steps through every day. Steph is an amazing person, and she has such an insight in people and characters, it’s wonderful. I think that’s what makes all her metas so good. Sweetie, thank you so much for following me and for being in this fandom. It would not be the same without you. <3

1. @daeneryskairipa

I honestly have so much love and respect for Linda. She is in a lot of fandoms, and she’s never caught up in any drama or negativity. She’s a very quiet, private and absolutely talented person, whose gifsets are something our fandom doesn’t deserve. Just when I started making gifs about a year ago, her edits were what I aspired mine to look like just because they’re so, so beautiful. I mean, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I use her gifs for my headers more than anyone else’s. Also, fun fact, but just when I started giffing, I had no idea how tags worked, so I looked at Linda’s tagging system and basically adopted it (sorry Linda lol). Go follow her, she produces such amazing content, our fandom is blessed to have her. <3

2. @clarkgriffon

I think Mira will always take a special place in my heart because she was one of the very first people I spoke to in this fandom. I believe I had about 90 followers at the time, and I messaged her to tell her that her tags were hilarious because she would always not only tag them purposefully to systematise content, but also add her reactions and it made things so much better. Mira is also one of those people who will see or hear you say some small detail about yourself once and remember it, and then randomly bring it up in the conversation. She just cares about people and remembers. She’s one of the most unassuming people I know because she will give you advice on the things that bother you and won’t push for anything more than you’re prepared to give in that moment. And sometimes that’s the best we can do for others. Just be there for them. And I honestly think no one produces more content for our fandom (mainly Bellarke as well) than Mira does, for which, sweetie, thank you so much because there were so many moments when I just thought there was no more hope for Bellarke, but then I’d see one of your gifsets and feel better. Really, thank you, I’m so happy to know you!

3. @keiraknighted

The story behind why Emily followed me is funny. Apparently, she was so frustrated with Zaven because she just wasn’t feeling it and it seemed to her like literally no one else was shipping Murven, so she purposefully searched in the anti zaven tag and found me. So that’s when she followed me. And I remember I followed her because she had this cute icon from Anne With an E, and I’d been reading her fics for like two years before that, but it never clicked that she was the person writing them hahah.

Emily is an amazing person. She’s so warm and sweet and understanding, and she’s one of those people who will go out of their way to do something if you ask them to. Her fanfics basically got me through the hiatus. I always joke with her that she has this talent to make you feel second hand embarrassment like no one else does, and I stand by those words because she’s just that talented. She can portray a situation in a way that you feel so involved you want to die of embarrassment when the character is embarrassed, and it’s a beautiful thing! Please go check out her fics, I promise you, you will not regret it. My absolute favourite of all time (Emily is probably sick of hearing about it by now lmao) is Smoke Break, which, do yourself a favour and go read right now please!! 

Thank you so much for everything, sweetie! I don’t know what kind of fandom experience I would have without you, probably trash smh.

4. @daenerya

Luna is someone about whom I should talk a lot more because she’s become such a vital part of my life and my fandom experience that it’s crazy. Luna is someone who never gives up on people, for better or for worse. She’s probably one of the most loyal people I know, and if there’s something I respect and love and appreciate, it’s loyalty. She helped me get through one of the toughest moments in my life by being completely calm while I was panicking and having pretty much a mental breakdown, giving me invaluable advice and just being there for me. Thank you so much for that, sweetie, I will never forget it.

She is also such a positive person. She probably won’t admit this to save her life, but she has so much love and hope for this world and people in general. She’s open to everyone, absolutely loving and sweet and understanding. 

Her edits are beautiful because she’s so talented but also puts an incredible amount of effort in. She has such strong opinions that she is unapologetic about because she cares about people and stands up for them. 

5.@lameblake

When you follow Ali, you don’t just get a mutual. You automatically receive a friend. And it’s amazing. Ali is probably the most supportive person I know. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re going through, however you deal with your issues, she’ll do her best to understand, accept it and help you get through your tough times. I honestly believe that she feels other people’s pain.

Please, go follow her. Give her all the love you can because she’s so, so deserving.

Honourable mentions,

for people who are just as important as the five mentioned above, but to whom I either haven’t spoken to a lot or haven’t talked recently because life got in the way:

@eternallyecho - for reaching out continuously, even if I’m being an antisocial ass, and for accepting and understanding me the way I am, believing that I know myself;

@easilydistractedbyfanfic - for being an endless flow of optimism and Murven content and support with all the random things I have asked your advice for;

@raven-reyes-of-sunshine for not only being there for me at the hardest of times, but also letting me do my best to be there for you because you definitely deserve all the love the world can give you and more!

@twinzmoon for being two little rays of sunshine who always want to make other people’s days better. Completely selfless and wonderful people deserving of the entire world;

@boomheda , @aproblematicpanda  and @sawyerblakes (actually not mutuals but this post would be a lie if I didn’t mention you) for being the proof that you don’t have to agree on every single thing to be friends with someone. Different interests don’t mean people can’t be kind and loving towards one another. Thank you guys, I love you three so much. You made my fandom experience bearable for the past year;

@pathokinessis for being a little ball of love and positivity who loves people without asking anything in return. Thank you, sweetie, you’re absolutely amazing and there’s no describing to how much I love and appreciate you!

P.S. If I haven’t mentioned you on this list, please don’t feel offended and remember that I love you and appreciate you.

[hvforks]

The Hobby: Creative Capital and the Death of Pleasure

Recently at work, I asked my colleagues what their hobbies were. The dictionary defines a hobby as “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”. I wasn’t surprised at some of the responses: a lot of my peers told me they didn’t have a hobby because they didn’t have time, but when pushed a little more, admitted to reading, gardening or playing a sport. A few colleagues interjected; any form of exercise, to them, was not a hobby but a necessity - interesting I thought (and a lot to unpack there for perhaps another time). However, one of my colleagues who I know to be very creatively active outside of their job, told me they didn’t have a hobby. "What about your podcasting?” I asked. The response was not what I would have expected; my colleague got so mad at me, their podcasting was not a hobby, it was a pursuit - it was a product of creative capitalism. 

The opportunities for creativity for most people’s lives is increasingly scarce. Exhausted after a day of work; there is less time and less money to pursue creative expression. Anyone who does find the time to create outside of their day jobs must then decide on its creative capital - its value rather than its pleasure. The funny thing is, is that once we have found a creative activity outside of work that gives us pleasure, we are quickly followed by a feeling of self-loathing or guilt. Our society’s puritanical roots assure us that any form of creative self-indulgence is morally wrong, so to make it more acceptable we remove the pleasure and focus on the value. As more and more jobs and processes become systematised, concentrated and commodified, the everyday micro acts of creativity must also fall under those rules. And so the creative act of fulfillment no longer becomes about pleasure, it becomes about capital. 

“Everyone is creative” is the slogan of a broad cultural shift in our society: “the artist” is being held up not as a poverty-stricken social malcontent, but as a triumphant pioneer of the new economy. Today, when the idea of a good, steady, life-long job seems impossible, corporate propaganda encourages us all to see ourselves as artistic souls. Instead of relying on big bureaucratic organisations like paternalistic corporations or the meddlesome nanny-state, we should all, like artists, rely on our personal portfolio of skills, passions and past accomplishments to secure short-term, no-string-attached “gigs”.

The reality of course is that no-one feels any special passion for working three part-time jobs, and few achieve aesthetic satisfaction from working in a call centre. But the idea of the artist and the promise of creativity are today being held up as “carrots” for workers in the age of creative capitalism. In our economic situation, many of us do free creative work all the time. We record music on our computers, we Photoshop images, we make short films, we write blogs or fan fiction - we teach ourselves. And we create what the internet calls ‘content’ and we do so because we enjoy it. So why can we not admit to ourselves that this form of work is pleasure, and not some form of individualised commodity? 

We try and survive in this digital world, amidst increasingly casual and unsecure employment with few guarantees about our futures, because of this creativity becomes a highly individualised means of solace. The number of people we consider artists and the range of things we consider creative practice are expanding everyday, and while there is a lot of potential for people to create new forms of community and empowerment, it all takes place within and as part of the expansion of global and local poverty, exploitation, and social dislocation.

Despite all this, establishment pundits have declared ours an age of creative capitalism. Capitalism, they argue, is the best system for providing creative opportunities for everyone. Indeed, many argue that capitalism thrives on what is called “creative destruction” - the way competition forces companies and individuals to constantly reinvent themselves or go under, the way the incessant drive towards profit forces innovation and dynamism. What capitalism does, in effect, is fundamentally shift what we could call the “economy of creativity”: it drastically alters what sorts of creativity we think are valuable and it focuses humanity’s creative energies towards earning ever greater profit for the few. This system has quickly destroyed the planet and most people’s lives because it has no vision for the future. It is driven by irrational and pathological competition for profit, not by any compassionate and collective social vision. Imagine what the world would be like if we focused our creativity towards other ends?

I’m not going to lie, you can be very creative under capitalism, and many people are. But real creativity, the sort of creativity that is about pleasure and community fulfillment is almost impossible under capitalism. It is a privilege reserved for a very select few, usually based on their ability to make someone else money. Capitalism doesn’t make good use of human talents; it relies on exploitation and a fundamentally unjust division of labour. This system imprisons creativity in the prism of brutal economic “necessity”. 

We need to focus on making it clear that real, deep creativity can never be achieved as an individual possession but is always a collective process, bound up with values of equality, social justice and community. The promise of pleasure can only be fulfilled in a very different society than ours. Creativity must embrace its potential and promise as a key part of cultivating critical, revolutionary communities that resist capitalism, colonialism, gender oppression and racism and create fierce and sustainable alternatives within and against the status quo. Creativity and pleasure are, in part, the way we refuse our current “reality” and, in a very small and often abstract way, propose or model something different. 

Image: Oscar Mellow, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 1972. Courtesy of Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre.

[garywonghc]

The Four Seals of Dharma are Buddhism in a Nutshell

by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

People often ask me: “What is Buddhism in a nutshell?” Or they ask, “What is the particular view or philosophy of Buddhism?”

Unfortunately, in the West Buddhism seems to have landed in the religious department, even in the self-help or self-improvement department, and clearly it’s in the trendy meditation department. I would like to challenge the popular definition of Buddhist meditation.

Many people think meditation has something to do with relaxation, with watching the sunset or watching the waves at the beach. Charming phrases like “letting go” and “being carefree” come to mind. From a Buddhist point of view, meditation is slightly more than that.

First, I think we need to talk about the real context of Buddhist meditation. This is referred to as the view, meditation and action; taken together, these constitute quite a skillful way of understanding the path. Even though we may not use such expressions in everyday life, if we think about it, we always act according to a certain view, meditation and action. For instance, if we want to buy a car, we choose the one we think is the best, most reliable and so on. So the “view,” in this case, is the idea or belief that we have, that is, that the car is a good one. Then the “meditation” is contemplating and getting used to the idea, and the “action” is actually buying the car, driving it and using it. This process is not necessarily something Buddhist; it’s something we’re doing all the time. You don’t have to call it view, meditation and action. You can think of it as “idea,” “getting used to,” and “obtaining.”

So what is the particular view that Buddhists try to get used to? Buddhism is distinguished by four characteristics, or “seals.” Actually, if all these four seals are found in a path or a philosophy, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Buddhist or not. You can call it what you like; the words “Buddhist” or “Buddhism” are not important. The point is that if this path contains these four seals, it can be considered the path of the Buddha.

Therefore, these four characteristics are called “the Four Seals of Dharma.” They are:

All compounded things are impermanent.

All emotions are painful. This is something that only Buddhists would talk about. Many religions worship things like love with celebration and songs. Buddhists think, “This is all suffering.”

All phenomena are empty; they are without inherent existence. This is actually the ultimate view of Buddhism; the other three are grounded on this third seal.

The fourth seal is that nirvana is beyond extremes.

Without these four seals, the Buddhist path would become theistic, religious dogma, and its whole purpose would be lost. On the other hand, you could have a surfer giving you teachings on how to sit on a beach watching a sunset: if what he says contains all these four seals, it would be Buddhism. The Tibetans, the Chinese, or the Japanese might not like it, but teaching doesn’t have to be in a “traditional” form. The four seals are quite interrelated, as you will see.

THE FIRST SEAL: ALL COMPOUNDED THINGS ARE IMPERMANENT

Every phenomenon we can think of is compounded, and therefore subject to impermanence. Certain aspects of impermanence, like the changing of the weather, we can accept easily, but there are equally obvious things that we don’t accept.

For instance, our body is visibly impermanent and getting older every day, and yet this is something we don’t want to accept. Certain popular magazines that cater to youth and beauty exploit this attitude. In terms of view, meditation and action, their readers might have a view — thinking in terms of not aging or escaping the aging process somehow. They contemplate this view of permanence, and their consequent action is to go to fitness centers and undergo plastic surgery and all sorts of other hassles.

Enlightened beings would think that this is ridiculous and based on a wrong view. Regarding these different aspects of impermanence, getting old and dying, the changing of the weather, etc., Buddhists have a single statement, namely this first seal: phenomena are impermanent because they are compounded. Anything that is assembled will, sooner or later, come apart.

When we say “compounded,” that includes the dimensions of space and time. Time is compounded and therefore impermanent: without the past and future, there is no such thing as the present. If the present moment were permanent, there would be no future, since the present would always be there. Every act you do — let’s say, plant a flower or sing a song — has a beginning, a middle and an end. If, in the singing of a song, the beginning, middle or end were missing, there would be no such thing as singing a song, would there? That means that singing a song is something compounded.

“So what?” we ask. “Why should we bother about that? What’s the big deal? It has a beginning, middle, and end — so what?” It’s not that Buddhists are really worried about beginnings, middles or ends; that’s not the problem. The problem is that when there is composition and impermanence, as there is with temporal and material things, there is uncertainty and pain.

Some people think that Buddhists are pessimistic, always talking about death, impermanence and aging. But that is not necessarily true. Impermanence is a relief! I don’t have a BMW today and it is thanks to the impermanence of that fact that I might have one tomorrow. Without impermanence, I am stuck with the non-possession of a BMW, and I can never have one. I might feel severely depressed today and, thanks to impermanence, I might feel great tomorrow. Impermanence is not necessarily bad news; it depends on the way you understand it. Even if today your BMW gets scratched by a vandal, or your best friend lets you down, if you have a view of impermanence, you won’t be so worried.

Delusion arises when we don’t acknowledge that all compounded things are impermanent. But when we realise this truth, deep down and not just intellectually, that’s what we call liberation: release from this one-pointed, narrow-minded belief in permanence. Everything, whether you like it or not — even the path, the precious Buddhist path — is compounded. It has a beginning, it has a middle and it has an end.

When you understand that “all compounded things are impermanent,” you are prepared to accept the experience of loss. Since everything is impermanent, this is to be expected.

THE SECOND SEAL: ALL EMOTIONS ARE PAINFUL

The Tibetan word for emotion in this context is zagche, which means “contaminated” or “stained,” in the sense of being permeated by confusion or duality.

Certain emotions, such as aggression or jealousy, we naturally regard as pain. But what about love and affection, kindness and devotion, those nice, light and lovely emotions? We don’t think of them as painful; nevertheless, they imply duality, and this means that, in the end, they are a source of pain.

The dualistic mind includes almost every thought we have. Why is this painful? Because it is mistaken. Every dualistic mind is a mistaken mind, a mind that doesn’t understand the nature of things. So how are we to understand duality? It is subject and object: ourselves on the one hand and our experience on the other. This kind of dualistic perception is mistaken, as we can see in the case of different persons perceiving the same object in different ways. A man might think a certain woman is beautiful and that is his truth. But if that were some kind of absolute, independent kind of truth, then everyone else also would have to see her as beautiful as well. Clearly, this is not a truth that is independent of everything else. It is dependent on your mind; it is your own projection.

The dualistic mind creates a lot of expectations — a lot of hope, a lot of fear. Whenever there is a dualistic mind, there is hope and fear. Hope is perfect, systematised pain. We tend to think that hope is not painful, but actually it’s a big pain. As for the pain of fear, that’s not something we need to explain.

The Buddha said, “Understand suffering.” That is the first Noble Truth. Many of us mistake pain for pleasure — the pleasure we now have is actually the very cause of the pain that we are going to get sooner or later. Another Buddhist way of explaining this is to say that when a big pain becomes smaller, we call it pleasure. That’s what we call happiness.

Moreover, emotion does not have some kind of inherently real existence. When thirsty people see a mirage of water, they have a feeling of relief: “Great, there’s some water!” But as they get closer, the mirage disappears. That is an important aspect of emotion: emotion is something that does not have an independent existence.

This is why Buddhists conclude that all emotions are painful. It is because they are impermanent and dualistic that they are uncertain and always accompanied by hopes and fears. But ultimately, they don’t have, and never have had, an inherently existent nature, so, in a way, they are not worth much. Everything we create through our emotions is, in the end, completely futile and painful. This is why Buddhists do shamatha and vipashyana meditation — this helps to loosen the grip that our emotions have on us, and the obsessions we have because of them.

Question: Is compassion an emotion?

People like us have dualistic compassion, whereas the Buddha’s compassion does not involve subject and object. From a buddha’s point of view, compassion could never involve subject and object. This is what is called mahakaruna — great compassion.

I’m having difficulty accepting that all emotions are pain.

Okay, if you want a more philosophical expression, you can drop the word “emotion” and simply say, “All that is dualistic is pain.” But I like using the word “emotion” because it provokes us.

Isn’t pain impermanent?

Yeah! If you know this, then you’re all right. It’s because we don’t know this that we go through a lot of hassles trying to solve our problems. And that is the second biggest problem we have — trying to solve our problems.

THE THIRD SEAL: ALL PHENOMENA ARE EMPTY; THEY ARE WITHOUT INHERENT EXISTENCE

When we say “all,” that means everything, including the Buddha, enlightenment, and the path. Buddhists define a phenomenon as something with characteristics, and as an object that is conceived by a subject. To hold that an object is something external is ignorance, and it is this that prevents us from seeing the truth of that object.

The truth of a phenomenon is called shunyata, emptiness, which implies that the phenomenon does not possess a truly existent essence or nature. When a deluded person or subject sees something, the object seen is interpreted as something really existent. However, as you can see, the existence imputed by the subject is a mistaken assumption. Such an assumption is based on the different conditions that make an object appear to be true; this, however, is not how the object really is. It’s like when we see a mirage: there is no truly existing object there, even though it appears that way. With emptiness, the Buddha meant that things do not truly exist as we mistakenly believe they do, and that they are really empty of that falsely imputed existence.

It is because they believe in what are really just confused projections that sentient beings suffer. It was as a remedy for this that the Buddha taught the Dharma. Put very simply, when we talk about emptiness, we mean that the way things appear is not the way they actually are. As I said before when speaking about emotions, you may see a mirage and think it is something real, but when you get close, the mirage disappears, however real it may have seemed to begin with.

Emptiness can sometimes be referred to as dharmakaya, and in a different context we could say that the dharmakaya is permanent, never changing, all pervasive, and use all sorts of beautiful, poetic words. These are the mystical expressions that belong to the path, but for the moment, we are still at the ground stage, trying to get an intellectual understanding. On the path, we might portray Buddha Vajradhara as a symbol of dharmakaya, or emptiness, but from an academic point of view, even to think of painting the dharmakaya is a mistake.

The Buddha taught three different approaches on three separate occasions. These are known as The Three Turnings of the Wheel, but they can be summed up in a single phrase: “Mind; there is no mind; mind is luminosity.”

The first, “Mind,” refers to the first set of teachings and shows that the Buddha taught that there is a “mind.” This was to dispel the nihilistic view that there is no heaven, no hell, no cause and effect. Then, when the Buddha said, “There is no mind,” he meant that mind is just a concept and that there is no such thing as a truly existing mind. Finally, when he said, “Mind is luminous,” he was referring to buddhanature, the undeluded or primordially existing wisdom.

The great commentator Nagarjuna said that the purpose of the first turning was to get rid of non-virtue. Where does the non-virtue come from? It comes from being either eternalist or nihilist. So in order to put an end to non-virtuous deeds and thoughts, the Buddha gave his first teaching. The second turning of the Dharma-wheel, when the Buddha spoke about emptiness, was presented in order to dispel clinging to a “truly existent self” and to “truly existent phenomena.” Finally, the teachings of the third turning were given to dispel all views, even the view of no-self. The Buddha’s three sets of teaching do not seek to introduce something new; their purpose is simply to clear away confusion.

As Buddhists we practice compassion, but if we lack an understanding of this third seal — that all phenomena are empty — our compassion can backfire. If you are attached to the goal of compassion when trying to solve a problem, you might not notice that your idea of the solution is entirely based on your own personal interpretation. And you might end up as a victim of hope and fear, and consequently of disappointment. You start by becoming a “good Mahayana practitioner,” and, once or twice, you try to help sentient beings. But if you have no understanding of this third seal, you’ll get tired and give up helping sentient beings.

There is another kind of a problem that arises from not understanding emptiness. It occurs with rather superficial and even jaded Buddhists. Somehow, within Buddhist circles, if you don’t accept emptiness, you are not cool. So we pretend that we appreciate emptiness and pretend to meditate on it. But if we don’t understand it properly, a bad side effect can occur. We might say, “Oh, everything’s emptiness. I can do whatever I like.” So we ignore and violate the details of karma, the responsibility for our action. We become “inelegant,” and we discourage others in the bargain. His Holiness the Dalai Lama often speaks of this downfall of not understanding emptiness. A correct understanding of emptiness leads us to see how things are related, and how we are responsible for our world.

You can read millions of pages on this subject. Nagarjuna alone wrote five different commentaries mostly dedicated to this, and then there are the commentaries by his followers. There are endless teachings on establishing this view. In Mahayana temples or monasteries people chant the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra — this is also a teaching on the third seal.

Philosophies or religions might say, “Things are illusion, the world is maya, illusion,” but there are always one or two items left behind that are regarded as truly existent: God, cosmic energy, whatever. In Buddhism, this is not the case. Everything in samsara and nirvana — from the Buddha’s head to a piece of bread — everything is emptiness. There is nothing that is not included in ultimate truth.

Question: If we ourselves are dualistic, can we ever understand emptiness, which is something beyond description?

Buddhists are very slippery. You’re right. You can never talk about absolute emptiness, but you can talk about an “image” of emptiness — something that you can evaluate and contemplate so that, in the end, you can get to the real emptiness. You may say, “Ah, that’s just too easy; that’s such crap.” But to that the Buddhists say, “Too bad, that’s how things work.” If you need to meet someone whom you have never met, I can describe him to you or show you a photograph of him. And with the help of that photo image, you can go and find the real person.

Ultimately speaking, the path is irrational, but relatively speaking, it’s very rational because it uses the relative conventions of our world. When I’m talking about emptiness, everything that I’m saying has to do with this “image” emptiness. I can’t show you real emptiness but I can tell you why things don’t exist inherently.

In Buddhism there’s so much iconography that you might think it was the object of meditation or an object of worship. But, from your teaching, am I to understand that this is all non-existent?

When you go to a temple, you will see many beautiful statues, colours and symbols. These are important for the path. These all belong to what we call “image-wisdom,” “image-emptiness.” However, while we follow the path and apply its methods, it is important to know that the path itself is ultimately an illusion. Actually, it is only then that we can properly appreciate it.

THE FOURTH SEAL: NIRVANA IS BEYOND EXTREMES

Now that I have explained emptiness, I feel that the fourth seal, “Nirvana is beyond extremes,” has also been covered. But briefly, this last seal is also something uniquely Buddhist. In many philosophies or religions, the final goal is something that you can hold on to and keep. The final goal is the only thing that truly exists. But nirvana is not fabricated, so it is not something to be held on to. It is referred to as “beyond extremes.”

We somehow think that we can go somewhere where we’ll have a better sofa seat, a better shower system, a better sewer system, a nirvana where you don’t even have to have a remote control, where everything is there the moment you think of it. But as I said earlier, it’s not that we are adding something new that was not there before. Nirvana is achieved when you remove everything that was artificial and obscuring.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a monk or a nun who has renounced worldly life or you are a yogi practicing profound tantric methods. If, when you try to abandon or transform attachment to your own experiences, you don’t understand these four seals, you end up regarding the contents of your mind as the manifestations of something evil, diabolical and bad. If that’s what you do, you are far from the truth. And the whole point of Buddhism is to make you understand the truth. If there were some true permanence in compounded phenomena; if there were true pleasure in the emotions, the Buddha would have been the first to recommend them, saying, “Please keep and treasure these.” But thanks to his great compassion, he didn’t, for he wanted us to have what is true, what is real.

When you have a clear understanding of these four seals as the ground of your practice, you will feel comfortable no matter what happens to you. As long as you have these four as your view, nothing can go wrong. Whoever holds these four, in their heart, or in their head, and contemplates them, is a Buddhist. There is no need for such a person even to be called a Buddhist. He or she is by definition a follower of the Buddha.

[jbeshir]

On Unconstrained Use Of Social Power and the Ingroup

This is written in response to two things I’ve seen recently. One was a Facebook post within the Bay Area rationalist community. among people with minor local social power, which casually proposed lying to people if you thought it would make them more right eventually, and the other is some more recent Slytherin positivity posts within the Tumblr community. Both were stated relatively lightly and aren’t worth making a fuss in and of themselves, but in conjunction they provide a good opportunity to express a fairly strong personal Thing I have about this topic, which might or might not be unfair.

If there’s a conclusion at all, it’s that maybe it’s worth noting the limits of what you favour more often, both to avoid sanctioning bad things and to make it clear to people that you wouldn’t sanction bad things.

I think the fair, natural read of the whole “Slytherin positivity” meme is as a declaration that “unconstrained use of social power for the advancement of you and the people you choose” is a virtue. This has always bothered the hell out of me, because I find it not quite synonymous with but very close to “abuse of social power for the advancement of you and the people you choose”, usually simply stated as “abuse”. Certainly, it proclaims lacking constraints against doing it a virtue.

Now, I’m sure virtually no one actually means that. You can argue that “unconstrained” doesn’t have to mean the central constraints like “not lying” or “having some regard to how your actions affect others” but could just mean lacking a small number of less central constraints. You can argue that a lot of the unconstrained use might be things that would be okay anyway. You can argue that your goals could concern everyone, and “the people you choose” could be everyone. And you can say that it’s just not to be taken that seriously, none of the people saying it mean it that seriously.

But this has always come to me off a bit like arguing that in the phrase “kill all men”, “kill” can be metaphorical, or “all men” could just mean “the bad parts of masculinity, thereby making them not men as we currently mean the term”, or mean all people who are super evil men of the type they’re thinking of. And you can say that it’s just not to be taken that seriously. And similarly, I’m quite sure that most people saying that phrase think of it in one of those ways, or don’t mean it that seriously. But none of that changes that it can still be quite uncomfortable to have everyone around you saying something whose straightforward, obvious interpretation is like that.

And in both cases, they have the issue that a lot of genuinely bad stuff can get ignored by being phrased in a manner that’s compatible with the local praxis. In the former case, manipulative ideas like “lying to people so they’ll come around to believing [what I believe to be] correct things” suddenly sound cool and perfectly socially acceptable if you phrase them as a cool ‘Slytherin’ strategy. And it would be ridiculously easy to pass “lying to people so they’ll do what I want” off as that and evade any significant social consequences just by claiming that that’s what you thought you were doing.

This gets to me personally because I am fairly bad at reading people. The whole ‘autism’ thing. I compensate for this basically by putting a lot of effort into inferring how people think from what they say. Unfortunately, this works poorly if people misrepresent how they think; concrete lies are noticeable because I notice inconsistencies easily, being all systematising, but vague feelings-y things I wouldn’t be able to distinguish between being paranoid and actually noticing things, and if someone I trusted fed me bad feedback I’d probably believe them. I also want to be helpful and nice which means there are things people could get by deceiving me, and I don’t want to change that. And I’m low on existing strong social connections.

All of this means having half the people around me go “exploitation is the coolest thing ever, if someone used it to exploit someone here it’d be so cool, I’d probably want to fuck them and definitely wouldn’t ruin it by telling the person what was going on” is uncomfortable for me, personally. It is difficult to relax when you don’t trust your own judgement, and the people around you who seem to be acting friendly suddenly declare that they think exploitation through social power is the best thing ever, and are at least a little genuinely unreliable about the matter.

And if there ever was an incident in which someone in reasonable regard within the rationalsphere was found to have actually acted on any of these cool "exploit everythingone by lying” ideas, for the greater good or not, and they weren’t heavily socially disapproved of, I’d probably at least partially disassociate from the parts of the community involved, and avoid ever putting in work or money to help people anywhere nearby, and encourage everyone else who likes to be able to give things to their community safely and doesn’t think they can reliably win at the social games to also weigh their position. Not for retaliation, but as a defensive measure. The way you avoid gang violence is by not being friends with people who think gang violence is cool.

I get that if you’ve been screwed with badly enough, “I’ll choose my constraints” or “If a person is coercing you, your statements are under duress and you can’t be held to them”, or “doing what is needed to survive is okay, ethics limit you beyond that”, or other more moderate positions might not work for you anymore because your moral framework is owned and unreliable, and I think it’s for the best if anyone in that situation does just ignore it.

But I’d view going completely unconstrained like that as basically social beserking- and at least once you’re no longer screwed and have any power and reach, it’s a bad idea for anyone else to be standing nearby. I think if you want to be someone that isn’t dangerous to those around you it’s a good idea to stop at some point, and if you don’t then honestly you’re kind of alarming to me and I’m probably going to want to keep a safe social distance.

[laurenredhead]

On Unknowingness

I decided to write this blog as I’ve just been writing about this topic in an article on my own practice. The condition of ‘unknowingness’ in practice research is a difficult one to explain and for many people to grasp - particularly those who aren’t involved in this type of research themselves. The idea of ‘unknowingness’ most often causes people to think about Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unkowns’. And, to be fair, it is a little bit like that - although with fewer consequences for security. When thinking about the idea of ‘unknowingness’ I further reflected on how this concept is not only useful for practice research, but for conceptualising research as a whole.

Unknowingness in practice research describes the state in which not only has knowledge not yet been gained, but the conditions for gaining knowledge have not yet been created. As a result, not only is it not yet possible to articulate the knowledge claims of the research, it is also not possible to articulate what they are going to be. Understanding this is key to understanding what types of research questions practice research can reasonably ask at its outset, and what its knowledge claims will really be like. Both within and outside practice research disciplines, there are those who would like the research questions of practice research projects to look like those of empirical projects, and for their knowledge claims to be measurable in the same way that empirical knowledge claims are. The state of unknowingness indicates why this is not possible: if the conditions for understanding what knowledge is possible and how it can be gained are not yet created, then it is not possible to articulate this.

As a result, the research questions of a practice research project will most often be open ended questions. They will focus on the type of environment that should be created as a condition for knowledge creation. As an example from my own project: I was interested in how the liminal space between speech, voice, text, writing and notation might be investigated. Before embarking on the project I was not able to say what the knowledge that I would gain about this would or should be. I was only able to state that there is something about the nature of this space that I wanted to create the potential for knowing, and that this would create the potential for knowledge about those practices that border it. As such, this is a research aim that cannot be addressed by either qualitative or quantitative data. In the subsequent creative practice that investigated this question, I created the conditions for knowing. These conditions are also not conditions where measurement is possible: the knowledge claims of the practice are not empirical. Rather, they are tacit, embodied and disciplinary. The conditions in which this knowledge is gained are also ephemeral: they exist in the moment of performance but are not necessarily re-created by documentation of performance even though this might serve as a mnemonic for the researcher. Thus, despite gaining knowledge through the practice of the research, the practice-researcher re-enters the condition of unknowingness after the research has taken place, but this time with the memory of the embodiment of the knowledge gained in the research.

This concept is difficult enough for practice researchers to deal with, let alone those who do not take part in practice research themselves. It is why documentation and examination of process in practice research is of central importance, as it allows assessment not of the experience of the knowledge claims - which may be ephemeral - but of the conditions in which the researcher moved from unknowingness to knowing. It explains how the practice research created the conditions of the knowledge. The Australian dance practitioner-researcher Kim Vincs explains this well when she writes,

"art practice is able to produce knowledge in a unique, material and specific way. It is not a generic kind of knowledge that can be mapped onto other fields or works of art." [1]

As this knowledge is not generalisable or directly and exactly reproducible, this causes problems for those who believe that knowledge is a clearly defined category, and that research processes can only uncover it in a single way.

In the present-day UK university such people are more numerous than might be thought. ‘Blue skies’ research, wether involving practice or not, is suffering as a result of a drive for everything to be quantifiable, generalisable and reproducible, in the mistaken assumption that this will be more productive, more ‘useful’ and better value for (public) money. In reality it creates a restrictive environment in which research cannot function in the way that it should.

This LSE blog addresses the conditions, measurement and creation of knowledge in four disciplines (none of them is a practice research discipline). The conclusion is that current academic models and practice do not allow for the range of expressions of research and associated methodologies that would deeply investigate the questions that are of value to the researchers and their disciplines. The author writes that,

"In a neoliberal culture of measuring outputs, the range of forms of knowledge creation that are valued appears to be narrowing.”

This narrowing affects all researchers but can be observed acutely in practice research. There are three situations that, in my opinion, would benefit from the understanding and discipline of unknowingness (not only three in total - but three that I can directly apply this to right now):

Unknowingness as a part of the PhD application process would benefit potential researchers at this point. Many colleagues have observed that the PhD applications most likely to be funded are those that offer some degree of certainty: there is almost an expectation that the prospective researcher will have a good idea of the outcome of the research at the point of application. In reality, this should be considered a poor model of research: if the outcomes are predictable then the research might be less valuable than a situation in which they are not. Similarly, projects which propose extremely systematised empirical methodologies can be easily assessed at application stage whereas those whose methodologies are emergent as part of the research might be less easily assessed. This means that most universities are likely to express a preference for funding predictable, empirical, projects perhaps because of a fear of accountability. In this situation practice research projects are likely to be valued less because of their conditions of unknowingness (and perhaps this accounts for the increasing use of ethnography as an element of practice research projects†). However, in reality embracing unknowingness across practice and non-practice disciplines might encourage research innovation in all areas.

Unknowingness as part of the research bid process would benefit the range of projects and methodologies represented as a result of these schemes. This would further have implications for the diversity of researchers in universities and for the diversity of projects that serve as examples for future scholars and students. The same culture of measurement described above causes problems at all levels of the academy.

Unknowingness as part of undergraduate work might be better highlighted. Many academics encourage experimentation, workshopping, devising, etc., among their students, but students sometimes struggle to reconcile these methods of working with marking criteria and anxiety about doing well. Recognising unknowingness and the creation of the conditions for knowing as part of their work might help to prepare them better for the open-ended nature of creative life outside of the university. This might also require more flexible negotiation of assessment between tutors and students. Universities, on the whole, dislike this because it doesn’t create the measurable, generalisable, reproducible conditions of assessment that treat all students as homogenous and therefore supposedly give them predictability.

Yesterday I shared this quotation from John Cage that appears at the end of his Lecture on Nothing:

"All I know is that when I am not working I sometimes think that I know something but when I am working it is quite clear that I know nothing." [2]

Many academic colleagues - both practitioners and not - expressed their identification with this quotation, with some reflection on our own competence as practitioners and researchers. It’s a point that most people will identify with at some point. This is slightly tongue-in-cheek: Cage’s intention here is not to really denigrate his ability as a practitioner but to make clear that knowledge about and through practice can only be gained in practice. When he begins to work, he creates the conditions of knowing that reveal his previous state of unknowingness. That so many different colleagues identified with this statement indicates that unknowingness really is a condition of all sorts of research practices.

Beyond practice research, unknowingness is the state that reminds the individual that the empirical and the quantifiable do not really create the conditions in which one can know everything about the world. It is important to emphasise this in the present academic situation.

[1] Kim Vincs, ‘Rhizome/Myzone: A Case Study in Studio-based Dance Research’, in Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: I. B. Taurus, 2010) pp99-112; p.112. [2] John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Library, 1961), p.126.

†something for me to moan about another time.

[a-baroque-interlude]

Although we are all in agreement on how erudite and interesting Anthony Geraghty’s writing is, previous to reading his chapters on the Sheldonian, I read his essay in Rethinking the Baroque - ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Drawing Technique of the 1690s and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding’. I thought it was absolutely one of the best pieces of art historical writing I’ve ever read; I’ve been wanting to sit and quantify why I find it so wonderful, in the hopes that I can try and emulate it - so I thought I’d post it here!

My personal tutor told me that the only definable thing separating a 2:1 (my cosy abode) from a 1:1 (the dream) is the clarity and simplicity of your essay writing. Geraghty opens with a simple statement of what he is going to do. There is no overflowering of language or romantic preludes. Within the first paragraph he aligns his analysis with Heinrich Wölfflin’s description of the Baroque as ‘painterly’, setting up Hakwsmoor’s drawings in a dialogue between Wölfflin’s ontological and epistemological distinctions and Wren’s linear drawing style. He also very quickly structures his essay - first part being based on architectural theory and Wölfflin’s distinctions, second part being Hawksmoor’s drawings in reference to Locke’s essay - the essay being contemporary and therefore entirely relevant, no explanation really needed on why he’s bringing it in. In the final sentence of the first page, he hints at what we may discover by the end - a rethinking of the possibility of the ‘English Baroque’.

I very much enjoy the quick historical structuring Geraghty gives to his Wölfflin quotes - placing them in a linear dialogue with Plato and Vitruvius without overcomplicating the source, simply presenting to us the problem - “things as they seem” versus “things as they are” and whether an artist can present the two. He states that the purpose of Hawksmoor's drawings is to model perception, then factor this experience into the design. “Hawksmoor was conversant with the Vitruvian tradition of optical refinement”

He then, quite easily, relates this to Wren’s wonderful - 

“The architect ought, above all Things, to be well skilled in Perspective, for, everything that appears well in the orthography, may not be good in the mode, especially where there are many angles and procedures, and everything that is good in model, may not be so when built, because a model is seen from other station and distances than the eye sees the building”

He also brings in Panofsky, and Robin Evans (who talks on Renaissance and early modern europe), so now without too much heavy reading (and only 3 pages in!) we have a pantheon of theorists, contemporary and not, giving voices to his argument. Panofsky’s inclusion gives depth to the theoretical side, throwing in considerations of psychophysiological space, a swirling combination of Wölfflin’s ontological and epistemological distinctions - “it (space) is as much a consolidation and systematisation of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.”

Key language such as perspective and orthogonal drawing is used over and over again to solidify the key thoughts of the text, and to keep a strong thread going.

Next, Geraghty explores a select collection of Hawksmoor drawings which, more than just being strikingly wonderful examples (particularly - Hawksmoor’s unexecuted design for rebuilding whitehall palace, 1698!) they are not overwhelming in amount - there are four together, to be exact. 

He continually takes stock and updates his argument - “So, I would suggest that Hawksmoor’s drawings of the 1690s conform to Wölfflin’s description of Baroque because Hawksmoor is striving to depict the effect of buildings”. How does he not make this tedious? In the previous pages/paragraphs, he has devoted all text to describing the development of the idea with no reference to the original argument, making the update a well-needed tying down of his argument. 

He then goes on to say… “but not entirely”. 

“How can it be, when the design is so dramatically truncated, and then pen and ink technique is so essential diagrammatic?” It seems to me so far that he has set out a framework, a lovely methodological grid of ideas and theorists and then is filling in the grid with Hawksmoor, stretching him across the theory grid. 

Then he adds in Locke - simply describing why he is relevant (“the role of judgement in sensory perception, and locke;s distinction between primary and secondary qualities”). In the same paragraph, he negates too plain of a comparison, but lays out that Locke characterises Hawksmoor's drawings conceptually. Four paragraphs or so are dedicated to a simple layout of Locke’s theory, with no mention of Hawksmoor at all. Then he sets out “compare the primacy that locke affords to sensory knowledge with the more subjective aspects of hawkwamoors drawings”, immediately bringing in an image - a tower study of St Pauls. I also enjoy how at this point in the essay Geraghty introduces some really enticing, complicated and a bit arty concepts - light that facilitates vision, so without light there would be no perceivable form. Without this, the tower would cease to exist. He brings back his past argument - this St Pauls tower is not only subjective, main portion is orthogonal. Gerarghty brings in a second instance of Locke - the last few pages or so grappling with only his blank paper idea. Locke's second category of knowledge - acquisition, reflection. This is where Hawksmoor's drawings lie. 

“Hawksmoor’s sensory engagement with the world around him, reflected through the process of drawing, allowed him to pre-empt the experience of looking at unbuilt buildings. Nevertheless, it remains the case that Hawksmoor is not looking at St Pauls, he is conceiving it, and he is conceiving it with the subjectivity of the beholder already in mind, which he need not have done”

“Object does not precede the subject, as it does for Locke. Nor as we have seen does subject precede object. Subject and object are combined.” And he links it DIRECTLY to those perpective and orthogonal drawings. 

In conclusion, Geraghty’s article succeeds due to his very narrow and clearly defined focus - one essay, one architect, perhaps five images in total. However, complicated and nuanced readings are peppered in, allowing for further in-depth study but coming to an easily understandable conclusion that was really set out from the beginning. 

[felinevomitus]

The Future Is Female: Electric Indigo Interviewed

Electric Indigo photo by Markus Gradwohl.

Susanne Kirchmayr aka Electric Indigo began her career in 1989 as a techno DJ in Vienna, before moving to Berlin to produce work that “oscillates between experimental club music and electro-acoustic listening music”. On Thursday 18 May, Electric Indigo will return to the UK stage – after a twenty-year absence – to perform an immersive granular synthesis piece called 109.47 degrees. This work uses “the ideal tetrahedral angle in foam” as a metaphor to describe “a multifocal society of individuals” who live in an interdependent globalised world.

Indigo is perhaps best known in the UK as the founder of the international online database Female Pressure. After having published two widely-received and quoted surveys on female roles within the music industry, Indigo and her colleagues are planning to publish a “more systematic, more extensive” report in August 2017, “with a survey of evolvement and tendencies” in music festivals across the world.

While Indigo admits that early utopian ideals within electronic music have conceded to more neutral or objective views, she also argues that progressive platforms, such as Female Pressure, open up spaces of resistance, protest and solidarity for global political causes.

In this interview, conducted over Skype, Indigo talks to Ilia Rogatchevski about the philosophy and technology behind granular synthesis, her work with Female Pressure as well as the politics surrounding the use of sampled female voices in electronic music.

Ilia Rogatchevski: You started off your career as a DJ before developing an electro-acoustic avant-garde voice. When did this transition occur?

Electric Indigo: I think it was 2002 or 2001. I was invited to play at a festival and the curator of the festival had a vision to combine two people who had never met before, who came from different musical backgrounds. I developed a concert with Mia Zabelka, an avant-garde musician. We were combining my drum machines and synthesisers with her violin and live electronics. That was kind of wild. From there, I slowly started getting to know the improvisation scene in Vienna.

Are you still improvising now?

No, not really. I do that in the course of composition, when I try out things, but the amount of improvisation has been rather reduced during live concerts. This has to do with my means of sound generation. I work a lot with granular synthesis and the tools for this are high on CPU use, so I can’t incorporate all the software synthesisers in a live set. I have to pre-record. There is a part of improvisation to every live concert, of course, but that is more about working with the sound and, to a certain degree, with effects.

What is granular synthesis?

Granular synthesis is a way to synthesise sound from pre-existing audio recordings or so-called wave tables. You have an audio wave and you use that to generate new sounds by taking a very short piece of it. These short pieces are called grains. A grain by itself is so short that the human ear cannot really recognise it as music.

The trick is that you take a lot of grains and, by multiplying and overlapping them and playing them back in various forms, you create a new sound. On top of that new sound you can apply all the normal parameters for synthesis. So you have an amplitude envelope, for example, or you can apply all sorts of filters and EQs. In this process you create a new sound that does not sound in any way like the source material.

I understand that you’ve used this method in pieces like Morpheme, which samples a quote from Sadie Plant. Do you have a political motivation for pulling apart sound sources?

I’ve been struggling with conveying a political attitude in my artistic work, because my music is very abstract and I definitely prefer abstract ways of expression. At the same time, I think it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times we live in. I’m very often questioning myself: “How can I react?” And I have not found any satisfying answers yet.

I think, yes, one way is to use voices, but process them. I’m not too much into vocal music. Using a sentence like Sadie Plant talking about noise and cybernetics (“To let noise into the system is a kind of fine art in both cybernetic terms and in terms of making music, too.”) is just very inspiring. Having the conceptual constriction of only using this [quote], as basic raw material to develop a whole piece with, is an artistic challenge.

On the other hand, a piece like Chiffre, used 21 languages and dialects to reflect a rather pluralistic world. The problems we are facing are so complex that any sort of explicit message would seem inappropriate to me. I haven’t yet found a solution for that general problem of how to be political in my art.

Are you aware of the strand within sound theory that suggests there is an overwhelming tendency amongst male producers to cut up female voices?

I don’t know much about this issue, I must confess. What I know comes from friends who are actually singers and vocalists. For example, Caroline Churchill has had this experience with male sound engineers who would low cut [take away the bass from] female voices at 500Hz, or even higher.

I think this is a very interesting subject, but I’m not really an expert in it. I just find that the typical role of the female singer or the woman as the deliverer of some additional musical material is pretty annoying.

I’m conducting quite an interesting project about exactly this point, together with Antye Greie aka AGF, for a publication due out later this year. We started a discussion with me saying: “I have a problem with vocals in music. I like instrumental versions.” and she replied that she totally admires that each human voice is an absolutely unique instrument and that it cannot be replaced with anything else.

Maybe this is a good opportunity to ask about Female Pressure. What is it, how did it begin and why?

Female Pressure is an online database of women, non-binary and transgender artists who work in the electronic music scene, club culture and digital arts. It is a network that has been growing over 19 years and comprises of over 1,900 people from, I think, 72 countries at the moment.

I started it because, whilst touring, I was confronted with remarks regarding the exceptionality of being a woman DJ. In the beginning, I found this quite astonishing, because when I started as a DJ, I did not think about my sex or my gender. I was usually confronted with this ignorance in the middle of the night – shortly before a set at 3am, or shortly after, with 100dB or so in the room. Not ideal circumstances to adequately talk about this subject.

Usually my answer was: “Yes, it’s true. There are more guys than girls, but you must not forget…” and then I would start to list other female DJs and producers. At some point, in the mid-90s – when it was also clear that the internet was going to be a very important medium in the near future – I thought that I needed to systematise this.

It was quite clear to me that it should be a database that can be searched and could be accessible independent of time and place. Parallel to this, I also saw the necessity of communication within this network. We have been creating a mailing list and this mailing list is still our main tool for communication.

It’s hard to define what Female Pressure really is, because it’s not a collective. It’s way too big and diverse to be a collective. I rather see it as a swarm of like-minded people from many different countries. There is, of course, also potential for political action. For example, Our Rojava compilation that we did in 2016.

Have you had much involvement with the Rojava project?

Yes and no. It was Antye Greie’s idea to do something about the conflict in Syria and the Middle East, because she found out about this movement in Rojava with direct democracy and equality of women and men. Coming from that region is, of course, very exceptional and it seems to be a utopia growing in the middle of a heavy war zone. We wanted to show our solidarity and respect to the women there, holding up so strongly and fighting for the better.

I actually wanted to contribute a track, but I couldn’t for the political reasons that I talked about before. These problems are overwhelmingly severe and I could not find an appropriate artistic form to react to it.

But everything on Female Pressure is my work. I administer it and help by compiling texts and links. I had a supportive role, but not an active role with this project.

One of the things you do with Female Pressure is publish reports of women working in the music industry. The last one was published in 2015. How well was this report received and is there scope to do more work of this nature?

We are actually working on a new survey. The original plan was to release it again on International Women’s Day this year, to make it a regular biannual report. We couldn’t manage, so we decided to make the next one more systematic, more extensive and release it in August 2017, with a survey of evolvement and tendencies. We’re going to compare various festivals over the years from 2013 to 2017. We’re still in the process of collecting data and we will decide which scope we can achieve.

I think the survey of 2013 was really important, because we created huge media attention with that. It’s crazy and I can’t believe it, but we were actually the first to publish numbers about gender balance at festivals. Obviously that hit a nerve. A lot of people started to talk about this issue. The media presence and awareness is quite large, but the actual facts have not changed much. The pure commercial [festivals], they just don’t care. They have other priorities rather than making society better.

You’re coming to London soon to be perform 109.47 degrees at IKLECTIK. What is that piece? Can you talk about that?

It is a listening piece that explores how traditional instruments can be transformed. It reminds one of a trip into outer space. Every time I play this piece, it creates associations of spaceships, planets and uncanny atmospheres.

I created the music from recordings of a Baroque organ, played by myself, and recordings of the inside of a piano, played by my friend and colleague Angelina Yershova. I just found this raw material really inspiring, especially the organ, which was completely mechanical. The registers pulled only half way and sounded like breathing organisms.

The title came from a tetrahedral angle, which is the ideal angle to make foam as stable as possible. You can see it as an analogy to granular synthesis. You have little units, or bubbles, in the foam and together they form to make a completely different shape.

The reason why this came about, was an invitation to a festival called Dunkle Zeiten. The theme of the festival was membranes. Thinking about membranes, I thought about these bubbles. I also had to think about [Peter] Sloterdijk and his Spheres trilogy. Sloterdijk thinks about foam as a whole society. There are all these little social bubbles, but together they are a bigger structure, a bigger society.

Electric Indigo will perform ‘109.47 degrees’ at IKLECTIK on Thursday 18 May. Click here to buy tickets. For more information about Electric Indigo and her work, please visit her website. Ilia Rogatchevski Originally published by IKLECTIK, 27 March 2017